Blind Handshake
is published by Periscope Publishing and distributed by Prestel.
Available at St. Mark's Books, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The art criticism of the painter David Humphrey merits an anthology. But neither Humphrey nor Periscope wanted to present his writing as archival documents from 1990 to 2008. We decided it would be more innovative to treat the texts as the starting point for a book that acknowledges and extends the connections between Humphrey s studio practice and his criticism. The outcome is Blind Handshake. It foregrounds the social life surrounding contemporary art the practices and gestures, the dialogues and monologues that determine its place in the world. Organized thematically, the book considers Coupling Dramas, Unknowable Others, Collective Solitudes, Prosthetic Selves, and Good Liars. Artists drawn into the action include Richard Prince, Chris Ofili, Lucien Freud, Mamma Anderson, Tony Oursler, John Currin, Mary Heilmann, Catherine Murphy, and Amy Sillman. The book's designer Geoff Kaplan employed aspects of graphic novels, magazine layouts, and art monographs in translating the writing and illustrations into a mutant creature. Introductions by Chris Kraus and Alexi Worth provide contexts for understanding the book s presentation of the turbulent intersubjectivity that pervades contemporary art.

DAVID HUMPHREY has exhibited his art throughout the United States and curated several shows in New York City. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize and a Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art. His art criticism has appeared in Art in America, Art issues, among other publications.

GEOFF KAPLAN of General Working Group is a graphic designer who teaches at the California College of the Arts. He is currently writing and designing Power of the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter Culture, 1964-1974.

ALEXI WORTH is an artist and a critic published in Artforum and the New York TImes. His art has been featured at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery and P.P.O.W., both in New York City.

CHRIS KRAUS is a writer and filmmaker. Her publications include I Love Dick, Torpor, and Video Green. She founded Native Agents, an imprint of Semiotext(e), to publish work dealing with theories of subjectivity. In 2008, she was the recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather award in art criticism from the College Art Association.

November 24, 2009

Not to be outdone, Artforum this month [November] includes a review of Arthur Danto’s new book on Warhol, penned by Daniel Birnbaum, fresh from his summer job in Venice. Danto has been trying to strip Marcel Duchampof his mantle for years and crown Warhol as the progenitor of all things postmodern. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, beloved of Danto, once referred to the emperor Napoleon
as the "world soul on horseback" because of the way he embodied the
zeitgeist of his era, and if Danto has his way, we would recognize the
frazzled Warhol as a "world soul" in his own right, sans horse.

Warhol embraced the values of ordinary people, Danto claims, while
Duchamp mocked them from the outside. Warhol was inclusive rather than
subversive. Birnbaum suggests that Danto is rather too taken with his
idol, practically elevating him to sainthood. Apparently the Brillo Box
is compared at one point to the Holy Grail -- which is quite apt, at
least in the sense that there have been many bogus grails, too.

More, more, more, the mag ain’t thick for nothing.[...]

Last month Artforum featured excerpts from the new book by anti-globalization gurus Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In his opening editorial this month, Tim Griffin
revisits the question, in response to some negative feedback he
received on that particular editorial decision, specifically with
regard to the fact that Hardt and Negri’s enthusiasm for contemporary
art is misplaced. The ruling ethos of today’s art world, or so someone
wrote to Griffin, can be summed up as: "Theory is bad, political
thought in art is wrong, activism is jejune, the free market is good,
individualism is great, the amoral artist is genius."

Griffin claims that Hardt and Negri nevertheless prod the art world
to revisit itself with the future in mind and indulge in some fanciful
imagining. In Hardt and Negri’s view, thinking in the abstract is often
more important than dealing with the crude, materialistic realities of
the everyday world. In a long essay responding to this argument as laid
out in their new book Commonwealth, David Harvey, a radical geographer who teaches at the City University of New York, calls bullshit, bless him.

"Far too many of Hardt and Negri’s proposals remain locked. . . in
the realm of immaterial abstraction," Harvey writes, "and,
unfortunately, never acquire concrete form." Fast on his way to
becoming the pre-eminent Marxist of his generation, Harvey is a
theorist who has both feet on the ground. He accuses Hardt and Negri of
overlooking the importance of class-based identity and the immiserating
machinations of global capitalism. At the same time, Harvey graciously
commends Hardt and Negri for highlighting aspects of our contemporary
situation others generally overlook.

Harvey’s response is dense, and long -- so long that part of it is
relegated to that netherworld at the back of the issue, beyond the
reviews. Hardt and Negri’s reply is, thankfully, shorter, and touches
briefly on Harvey’s most striking critiques. Overall, you get the sense
from both pieces that hidden beneath all the accommodating prose are
strong disagreements that would come out in a public debate, but are
smoothed over for the glossy page. Still, it is nice to see these
impenetrable know-it-alls forced to admit they haven’t got it all
figured out: "in some areas in which, as a geographer, he has great
expertise. . . he points in directions our arguments could be
extended," H&N say of Harvey’s essay.

Props to Griffin for putting this kind of material into an art magazine -- it is almost like reading old issues of Artforum from the ‘70s.

Speaking of the ‘70s Artforum, perhaps the juiciest text actually comes in the letters page, almost lost between all those ads, where venerable critics Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss tell their side of their 1974 departure from the Artforum editorial board to form the art theory journal October. It was, they say, not the result of their disapproval of the famous naked-Lynda Benglis-with-a-dildo
ad, as the tale is usually told, but because of the sense of "invasion
of editorial policy by commercial fiat" (which is why, they note, October has neither ads nor pictures). Their letter, they say, was inspired by a Roberta Smith review of the "Lynda Benglis/Robert Morris, 1973-74" show at Susan Inglett Gallery. "Since the New York Times
has declined to print our letter addressing the inaccuracy, we now turn
to the publication where Benglis’s advertisement first appeared in
order to set the record, distorted by Smith, straight."

November 21, 2009

I am pleased to offer you my recent article, "Radical Refamiliarization," co-authored
with John Armitage (University of Northumbria) for The Journal of
Visual Culture (Volume 8, number 2, August 2009). The issue is out
at last. It is a Special Issue in which a number of scholars,
educators, curators, activists and artists respond to a questionnaire
on Barack Obama and visual mediation. Several of the articles
(including ours) engage the interesting developments surrounding
Shepard Fairey's Obama posters.

Click the link to download our article; see also the full Table of Contents on SAGE:

VendorBarpresents artists who will directly engage the public by presenting actions, exchanges and services that result in the production and distribution of artists editions made specifically for the event. As part of this year’s “E|AB’09 Special Events” series, VendorBar offers a unique site where interaction supersedes transaction.

Learn to Read Art: A History of Printed Matter presents a
comprehensive overview of Printed Matter, the artists' bookstore,
focusing on the philosophy established by its founders in 1976. The
exhibition radically questions the notion of art as an elitist
structure, and proposes an art conceived along democratic ideals, a
low-cost art that travels out into the world through the distribution
systems usually reserved for books and periodicals, or popular music.
Featuring more than 100 international artists, Learn to Read Art explores the artists' desire to create with the idea that art is both intimate, and for everyone.

Printed Matter's emphasis has always been on books; however, artists
have moved in many directions, experimenting with everything from
periodicals and vinyl records to posters and postcards. The exhibition
also includes more expectable editions, such as photographs, which, if
we think about it, were originally intended to be low-cost reproducible
media. And then there are somewhat less expectable formats, such as the
skateboards by Liam Gillick, Ari Marcopoulos and Mark Gonzales.

The exhibition follows the organization from storefront to
storefront over more than three decades, featuring installations by
Lawrence Weiner, Josh Smith, and Jenny Holzer. Josh Smith's book of 473
numbered silkscreened leaves is housed in a pair of wooden book covers,
themselves made from the table on which the silk-screening was done.
Spread out on the walls in the exhibition, they become an almost
delirious cacophony of repetition.

An architecture of book-shaped platforms by Gareth Long contains the
project and provides seating, display, and storage for the project.

Learn to Read Art: A History of Printed Matter is organized by
AA Bronson, President of Printed Matter, and produced in cooperation
with the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany. Its New York
presentation is part of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's new
programmatic series Free Space.